14 DAY TRIAL // 
The first time I died in Don’t Starve it was at the hands of a pig, who apparently has a number of homes in the woods, and it was mainly my fault: I did not yet understand the fact that I needed to click once for each swing of my axe.
This game is not about success or even about progress, this is an experience about pure survival, about using the environment and a limited about of skills to make sure that there’s a fire burning at night and that one has enough food to fill an ever growling belly.
Don’t Starve is also a game about learning, an experience that is teaching me to pay attention to my past experience and try to apply lessons learned to my current situations.
The team at Klei Entertainment delivers a simple game with much depth and, I believe, an analogy for a fundamental fact about man, as an individual and as a race: we have needs and we’re ready to do anything we need to in order to satisfy them.
Mechanically Don’t Starve is a sort of rogue-like: players control one character (unlocks will open up more possibilities) as he explores a large map, discovers and uses resources, meets creatures and fights battles all the while with an eye towards his hunger level.
When the game starts players are fairly helpless and they can’t actually stand up to any threat.
After a while you get to understand what to watch out for, where to travel to, what to pick up.
Fire is crucial to the early game because the night is rather frightful and can kill the character outright so early in the mornings I developed a routine of making sure that I had the ingredients to start a new one and only then went out in search of food.
Hunger is a terrible thing in Don’t Stare, especially when all you can get are berries and the occasional carrot.
I quickly created a trap and got one measly rabbit but I then failed to score another piece of meat for fays, until I summed up the courage, aided by my new grass made armor, and attacked a pig.
I cooked the meat at night and I ate it but I was hungry again a few days later.
So I decided to grow bolder and spend an entire day chasing down pigs in the woods to stock up on tasty charred meat.
Unfortunately my grass armor failed me and I was killed outright by a couple of killer bees (I decided that after all that meat I could use a little honey).
Death is permanent in Don’t Starve but it represents a learning experience and I quickly became fairly adept at surviving, even if food is growing ever scarcer.
The problem is finding the rarer elements of the game world that can lead to the development of more interesting items, which can make the game world easier to subdue.
One problem of the game is that starting location is very important and after a failed game where I managed to locate my camp near an abandoned farm I simply cannot bring myself to commit to a game where I cannot find one.
Don’t Starve has an interesting art style, somewhere between Fantastic Mr. Fox and Coraline and it works beautifully given the setting.
Klei aims to show the loneliness and the terror that being alone in a rather strange land would generate and both the graphics and the music contribute to the feeling in interesting ways.
Don’t Starve has the potential to deliver an experience that’s similar to Minecraft and Terraria in the long term, with constant updates adding more content and with dedicated players continuing to explore the innards of the game in order to learn how to get the biggest results.
The only problem is that I am not sure whether the core idea can sustain a mainstream player for more than a few hours, especially if he is unlucky when it comes to starting area and resources.
